Pitzer Spotlights

Professor John Norvell Named Faculty Fulbright to Brazil

Professor John Norvell

Visiting Professor of Anthropology John Norvell has been awarded a faculty Fulbright to research and teach in Brazil for fall 2006. Norvell will be located in Boa Vista, the capital of the northern Amazonian state of Roraima. He will teach urban anthropology at the federal university and assist in developing the first graduate-level program in anthropology in the entire Amazon basin.

The grant will also fund the first phase of Norvell’s new research project on ethnic and national identification in the state.

“This grant will allow me to ‘study up’ in this provincial Amazonian capital city,” Norvell explained. “I want to look at the reactions of the elites of the area to a recent wave of political mobilization by indigenous groups in the state. Their efforts have stirred up tense and even violent responses, and I hope that my research can help defuse this or at least give the indigenous groups a greater understanding of the social forces arrayed against them.”